The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Volume 1 Language

Yale, 1968 seventh printing. Very good in very good clipped dust jacket. A handsome copy of the original edition. VOLUME 1 ONLY, complete in itself. A seminal work. The conception of human beings as most fundamentally ?symbolic animals,? interposing systems of signs or systems of expression between themselves and the world, in Cassirer becomes the guiding philosophical motif for elucidating the corresponding conditions of possibility for the ?fact of culture? in all of its richness and diversity.Characteristic of the philosophy of symbolic forms is a concern for the more ?primitive? forms of world-presentation underlying the ?higher? and more sophisticated cultural forms ? a concern for the ordinary perceptual awareness of the world expressed primarily in natural language, and, above all, for the mythical view of the world lying at the most primitive level of all. For Cassirer, these more primitive manifestations of ?symbolic meaning? now have an independent status and foundational role that is quite incompatible with both Marburg neo-Kantianism and Kant?s original philosophical conception. In particular, they lie at a deeper, autonomous level of spiritual life which then gives rise to the more sophisticated forms by a dialectical developmental process. From mythical thought, religion and art develop; from natural language, theoretical science develops.…